Jefferson Lecture
On May 8, 2007, Mansfield delivered the 36th Jefferson Lecture ("the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities", according to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored the lecture). In his lecture, Mansfield suggests "two improvements for today’s understanding of politics arising from the humanities ... first ... to recapture the notion of thumos in Plato, and Aristotle... ...second ... the use of names—proper to literature and foreign to science".
This, of course, is a reference to his own philosophy, which forbade discounting the wisdom of the past simply because those who spoke it lived a long time ago.
Read more about this topic: Harvey Mansfield
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